Cat's Pajamas (15 page)

“I did as the scholar instructed,” he went on, “borrowing a rod from my uncle and setting off for the sea. A day's walk brought me to Lubeck Bay. What does a young man wish for? Love, you guess? Wrong, for love embraces only the possibility of itself, whereas wealth can purchase many things, including—let us not be sentimental, doctor—love. I baited my hook, threw out my line… and wished for a fortune.”

“Did you have to wait long?” Pothinos asked, curious in spite of himself.

“Barely a minute.”

Stragon plunged his hand into the glass bowl, gripping the cimberfish and lifting it free. Mercilessly he impaled it on his hook. A crude way to treat such a rare and valuable creature, but evidently this step was essential.

“I caught a manta ray,” Stragon said, “its great flaps covered with fabulous designs. Upon gaffing it, I dragged it on shore and slit it open.”

“Slit
it?”

“As my instincts bade. The ray contained the shredded corpse of my cimberfish… and something else.”

“Let me guess.” Pothinos coughed on his cynicism. “Money.”

“A leather sack. Inside, a fortune in precious gems. The descendents of those gems—the profits on the investments they bought—have enabled me to pay you so royally for your talents.”

After casting out his tethered cimberfish, Stragon climbed onto a large rock that jutted into Rosamond like a pier and sat down.

“Knowing of my success with the first cimberfish,” he resumed, “you will not be surprised to learn that barely a month went by before I was at it again. This time I tried the river that cut through my grandfather's farm in Bavaria. What good are riches if the Reaper comes? Hence, my second wish was, simply, to live forever. When I opened my catch—a wondrous eel with skin like wet silk—a glass phial rolled onto the ground. For several days I struggled with myself, eventually resolving to drink what the phial contained, a warm sour liquid that indeed proved to be the elixir of life.”

Mosquitoes fidgeted around Stragon's bobber like a hundred satellites orbiting a planet.

“How old are you?” Pothinos inquired cautiously, stepping away from the rock as if his patron's warped imagination might be infectious.

“When did the Wars of the Roses begin?”

“The what?”

“Wars of the Roses.”

“I don't know. Five centuries ago.”

“I was twelve at the time.”

Pothinos thought of his sister Lucinda—how she had walked into his bedroom on his seventeenth birthday and informed him that the Split Pea with Ham People had just arrived from Betelgeuse to make her Secretary General of Disneyland. This was somehow different. Stragon's tale had a coherence that bespoke sanity if not truth. He did not wander, as the mad do; his arguments contained no abrupt shifting of gears, as Lucinda's always did. But why all this pointless fantasy?

A sharp breeze moved across the lake, etching twists and zags in the water. Pothinos fixed on the bobber, the cynosure of his patron's scheme. Occasionally Stragon pulled back on the rod, moving the bright sphere and animating the half-dead bait.

“One whole cimberfish left,” Stragon continued his story, “yet I could not settle on a third wish. Wealth and eternal youth: what more does a man need? I nurtured the remaining bait as best I could, keeping it alive as a kind of insurance policy. Even after the fish died, I sought to retard its putrefaction by soaking it in alcohol. Years passed. Decades. By the time I realized what my third wish might be—must be—it was too late. Nothing remained but an eye. I packed the organ in ice and set off on my quest.”

The bobber, still afloat, sent tendrils of light across the lake. Against his better judgment, Pothinos wondered what his own third wish might have been. The mending of his sister's mind? A Nobel Prize? Or was he darker than that—the ruin of a colleague?

“I took to haunting fishing wharfs,” Stragon said. “Zoos. Circus side shows. Any place where a cimberfish might turn up. Useless. I went fishing often, dissecting whatever I caught. Empty. To catch your fondest desire, you need the right bait.” He slid his wallet from his vest, removed the promised payment from his vest, and thrust it toward Pothinos. “And then, just when I had abandoned hope, your cleverness came into the world.”

“I suppose that my goal,” said Pothinos, taking the check, “after wealth and long life, would be for my sister to—”

“Look!” Ecstasy seized Stragon. “There!” Rising, he jammed the handle tight against his abdomen. “I've got him!” He cranked the reel backward, filling the night with the stately buzz of its bearings. “Good God, I've got him!”

Pothinos studied Rosamond. The bobber had vanished.

“Here I am!” Stragon screamed. “Right here!”

Sinewy blackness crashed out of the lake, shattering its surface like a panther diving through a mirror. A fish, but one whose anatomy—slimy body, hatchet fins—seemed merely its mouth's way of getting from one place to another.

Pothinos's intestines writhed around themselves. His brain shivered in his skull.

“I wish for it to end!” screamed Stragon. His hand moved frantically, reeling in the fetid, organic abyss, its pulpy lips, gums like rotten logs, fangs thrusting downward like stalactites. “Hear me, fish? I want it to be over!”

Through the haze of his astonishment, Pothinos apprehended his patron's pain. Over. Yes, of course, the poor bastard wanted out, no more curse of immortality, no more standing by as his loved ones marched down the cold stone road to the tomb, leaving him behind.

Relentlessly Stragon's catch cruised toward shore, its eyes stroking the darkness like beacons marking the coast of hell. Even as Pothinos drew back—what an extraordinary event! what a dazzling datum!—his patron hurled down the fishing rod and jumped into the shallows.

“Over!”

A snap, a fat spasm of movement, and the wish was complete. Bait gone. Mouth gone. Stragon gone.

Rosamond grew still, as if a blast of winter had sealed it with ice. Pothinos stood on the silent shore, vibrating with shock, gulping down air to feed his racing heart.

Slowly he picked up Stragon's abandoned fishing rod. He turned and staggered from the scene of the… the what?
Miracle.
The word sounded eerily correct.

Or was it just a trick? In a few seconds Stragon would be at his side, pointing at him, sniggering?

No: the Rosamond beast was truly
outré,
something that present paradigms could not accommodate; tonight Pothinos had glimpsed the universe's secret smirk, row upon row of strange teeth flashing somewhere beyond the knowable. A miracle: then he must move with deliberation. Exactly how many cimberfish cells lay back at the Institute? A hundred million? Easily. A hundred million potential wishes, each a glint in its parent's unblinking eye. No: more. He could clone the clones, clone the clones of the clones! Endless wishes, spiraling to the edge of reality like interstellar dust!

An owl's hoot blasted through the gloomy woods like a landlocked foghorn. Careful, Pothinos told himself. Take it easy. Beware the rub.

Wish-makers, he saw, traditionally committed the same error. Each used the gift to improve his own situation, and, succumbing to greed, quickly came to ruin. Ah, but suppose the wish-maker never benefited himself? Suppose all his desires went toward fashioning some separate, distant dominion? What a fine, flawless world Pothinos might make: blue skies, green continents, a marvelously complex biosphere. Yes, it could be done, the fallacy outflanked, the rub circumvented, power both absolute and uncorrupting, yes, yes, yes…

Pothinos ran. Dawn washed across the dark sky, conjuring fir trees and brick buildings from the gloom.

Defrosting the eye was the simplest of procedures. A moment to prepare the hot plate, a moment to thaw the surrounding ice. When Pothinos reached into the puddle to remove the cimberfish's remains, Maxie strutted over and wove amid his legs as if decorating a maypole.

Pothinos pulled away, leaving the animal startled and miffed. Was this truly the right course?

Arching her back, Maxie meowed.

Yes, this was right. The age of miracles, thank God, was over. A biologist, anyone, must live in his own time.

“Make a wish, Maxie!” Pothinos shouted, and he rolled the eye across the floor toward the waiting, hungry cat.

T
HE CURTAIN RISES ON
the prophet MOSES, caught in the glow of a spotlight and sitting atop a mound of Dead Sea sand. The famous Tablets of the Law stick out of the dune like ears on a Mickey Mouse cap. A large rear-projection video screen hangs over Moses's head. An off-stage INTERVIEWER addresses the patriarch.

INTERVIEWER: SO there we are, me and Dad and my little sister, sitting in the old Ziegfeld Theatre on 54th Street. The lights go down, the Paramount logo flashes across the screen, and then the movie comes on, Cecil B. DeMille's
The Ten Commandments.

MOSES: What a terrific picture.

INTERVIEWER: It sure impressed me as a kid. Today I find it a bit hokey.

MOSES: Hokey? Hokey? Hell, no, Mr. DeMille was a certifiable genius.

INTERVIEWER: IS it really true the original cut ran over seven hours?

MOSES:
(grunt of assent)
No theater was willing to book the thing. The management would've had to serve dinner in the middle, like on a transcontinental flight from New York to Paris.

INTERVIEWER: I heard a rumor that some of the original rushes still exist.

MOSES: No way, Marty. You pull papyrus out by the roots and—bang—it disintegrates in a few weeks.

Moses laughs boorishly.

INTERVIEWER: In fact, I understand that those very rushes are in your possession.

MOSES: Over the past forty years, I've managed to collect bits and pieces from nearly every missing scene.

INTERVIEWER: For example?

MOSES: The Plagues of Egypt. The release prints included blood, darkness, and hail…

An excerpt from
The Ten Commandments
appears on the video screen: fiery hail clattering across the balcony of Pharaoh's palace.

MOSES: But they were lacking some of the really interesting ones. You should've seen what Mr. DeMille did with frogs.

The screen displays two elderly, working-class Egyptian women, BAKETAMON and NELLIFER, potters by trade, sitting on the banks of the Nile River. As they speak, BAKETAMON fashions a canopic jar, NELLIFER a soup tureen.

BAKETAMON:
(addressing interviewer)
The frogs? How could I ever forget the frogs?

NELLIFER: You'd open your dresser drawer, hoping to find some clean socks and—pop—one of those little flickers would jump in your face.

INTERVIEWER: Which plague was the worst?

BAKETAMON: The boils, I think. My skin looked like the back of the moon.

NELLIFER: The boils, are you kidding? The locusts were far worse than the boils.

BAKETAMON: The mosquitoes were pretty nasty too.

NELLIFER: And the gadflies.

BAKETAMON: And the cattle getting murrain.

NELLIFER: And the death of the firstborn. A lot of people hated that one.

BAKETAMON: Of course, it didn't touch Nelli and me.

NELLIFER: We were lucky. Our firstborns were already dead.

BAKETAMON: Mine froze solid in the hail.

NELLIFER: Mine had been suffering from chronic diarrhea since he was a month old, so when the waters became blood—zap, kid got dehydrated.

BAKETAMON: Nelli, your mind's going. It was your secondborn who died when the waters became blood. Your firstborn died in the darkness, when he accidentally drank all that turpentine.

NELLIFER: No, my secondborn got run over by a horse. It had nothing to do with religion. My third born drank the turpentine. A mother remembers these things.

INTERVIEWER: I was certain you'd be more bitter about your ordeals.

NELLIFER: Initially we thought the plagues were a bit much. We even wrote a book about it.

BAKETAMON:
When Bad Things Happen to Good Pagans.

NELLIFER: Then we came to understand our innate depravity.

BAKETAMON: There's only one really good person in the whole universe, and that's the Lord God Jehovah.

NELLIFER: Next to Him, we're a couple of slime molds.

INTERVIEWER: Sounds as if you've converted to monotheism.

BAKETAMON:
(nodding)
We love the Lord our God with all our heart.

NELLIFER: And all our soul.

BAKETAMON: And all our might.

NELLIFER: And besides, there's no telling what He might do to us next.

BAKETAMON: Fire ants, possibly.

NELLIFER: Killer bees.

BAKETAMON: Smallpox.

NELLIFER: I got two sons left.

BAKETAMON: I'm still up a daughter.

NELLIFER: The Lord giveth.

BAKETAMON: And the Lord taketh away.

NELLIFER: Blessed be the name of the Lord.

The screen goes blank.

INTERVIEWER: When you went up on Mount Sinai, Jehovah offered you a lot more than the Decalogue.

MOSES:
(displays excised footage)
Mr. DeMille shot everything, all six hundred and twelve laws. First to go were the prescriptions concerning slavery—the protocols for selling your daughter and so on. Unfortunately, those cuts reduced the running time a mere eight minutes.

An excerpt from The Ten Commandments appears on the screen: God's animated forefinger etching the Decalogue onto the face of Sinai, while Charlton Heston watches with a mixture of awe, fascination, and incredulity. As the last rule is carved—THOU SHALT NOT COVET—the frame suddenly freezes.

GOD:
(voice-over)
Now for the details.
(beat)
When you go to war against your enemies and the Lord your God delivers them into your power, if you see a beautiful woman among the prisoners and find her desirable, you may make her your wife.

INTERVIEWER: I have to admire Mr. DeMille for using something like that. Deuteronomy 21:10, right?

MOSES: He was a gutsier filmmaker than his detractors imagine.

GOD:
(voice-over)
When two men are fighting together, if the wife of one intervenes to protect her husband by putting out her hand and seizing the other by the private parts, you shall cut off her hand and show no pity.

INTERVIEWER: Private parts?

MOSES: The original Hebrew is less euphemistic. Deuteronomy 25:11.

GOD:
(voice-over)
If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son, his father and mother shall bring him out to the elders of the town, and all his fellow citizens shall stone the son to death.

MOSES: Deuteronomy 21:18–21.

INTERVIEWER: And here I'd always thought DeMille was afraid of controversy.

MOSES: One ballsy mogul, Marty.

The screen goes blank.

INTERVIEWER: After the giving of the Law,
The Ten Commandments
jumps rather abruptly to the Children of Israel entering the Promised Land.

MOSES: Forty years of wandering in the wilderness, and poor Mr. DeMille had to edit out thirty-nine of them. The Book of Numbers ended up on the cutting room floor.

INTERVIEWER: He actually filmed those episodes?

MOSES:
(nodding)
The Lord giving my sister leprosy, causing the earth to swallow up Dathan, striking down the Israelites who disparaged Canaan, firebombing the ones who complained at Hormah, sending serpents against those who grumbled on the road from Mount Hor, visiting a plague on everybody who backslid at Peor…

INTERVIEWER: Damn theater chains. They think they own the world.

MOSES: I especially hated to lose that stirring speech I made to my generals following the subjugation of the Midianites.

INTERVIEWER: Would you like to deliver it now, for the record?

MOSES: Sure would, Marty. Ready? Here goes. Numbers 31:15–18.
(clears throat)
Why have you spared the life of all the women? These were the very ones who perverted the sons of Israel! Kill all the male children! Kill also all the women who have slept with a man! Spare the lives only of the young girls who have not slept with a man, and take them for yourselves!

INTERVIEWER: DO you suppose we'll ever see the version of
The Ten Commandments
that Mr. DeMille intended?

MOSES: Only yesterday I was talking to some nice folks down at the National Endowment for the Arts. They're willing to kick in three million for a restoration.

INTERVIEWER: A worthy cause.

MOSES: The worthiest, Marty. Believe me, there's justice in this old world. You simply have to wait for it.

Curtain.